CELEBRATING YOUNG AI TALENT Today I want to celebrate Saheed Azeez, a University of Lagos undergraduate and rising AI innovator who on 23 January 2025 unveiled YarnGPT a text-to-speech (TTS) AI model, designed to generate Nigerian-accented English and Nigerian languages (Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba). This is aimed at bridging the gap between global AI technologies and diverse local communities and cultures. Making AI more relatable and relevant.Saheed had recorded earlier success with another project NaijaWeb a Nigerian-centric dataset comprising 230 million GPT-2 tokens sourced from Nairaland, one of Nigeria’s largest online forums. Nairaland is a rich repository of conversations on a variety of topics and issues like politics, sports, entertainment, and everyday life, providing an authentic representation of Nigerian English, Pidgin, local slangs, and cultural nuances—elements often overlooked in global training datasets.By leveraging local platforms like Nairaland; Nollywood Movies for speech context and patterns; and combining them with cutting-edge AI tech, Saheed is building tools that are innovative and deeply relevant to the Nigerian experience. Models like YarnGPT can open the door to more users of AI solutions in such domains as education, customer service and entertainment.Africa (and indeed the world) is awash with young talent and innovators like Saheed who have the ability to contribute to the shaping of our future and the world. They only need to be given the right tools, platform and encouragement.#ai #aidemocratization #opensourceai #capacitybuilding #aigovernance
DrAlexanderGrey 